AKIPRESS.COM - In a rapid-fire crew exchange, three space station fliers return to Earth Friday, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan just four days before their replacements blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome a few hundred miles away, boosting the lab's crew back to six.

Soyuz TMA-17M commander Oleg Kononenko, strapped into the command module's center seat and flanked on the left by flight engineer/co-pilot Kimiya Yui of Japan and on the right by NASA's Kjell Lindgren, are scheduled to undock from the station's Rassvet module at 4:49 a.m. EST (GMT-5) on Friday, CBS News reports.

After moving a safe distance away, Kononenko and Yui will monitor a four-minute 41-second rocket firing starting at 7:19 a.m., slowing the ship by about 286 mph to drop out of orbit. A little more than a half hour later, the Soyuz descent module will settle to a jarring a parachute-and-rocket-assisted touchdown near the Kazakh town of Karaganda around 8:12 a.m. (7:12 p.m. local time).